Have you ever been referred to as a difficult woman? Oh, definitely. We talked more about Gay’s outlook on 2017 and beyond, and about the stories in Difficult Women: dark, yes, difficult, yes, but also luminous, transporting, and totally worth the effort. It’s like: Why so dark? I mean, have you seen the world? It’s an appropriate response.” “But when women write dark, all of a sudden it’s a thing. Dark stories, then, reflect dark times? “Men write dark stories all the time, and rarely is that darkness obsessed over,” she offers. “I think books come out when they’re supposed to, even if they don’t come out when you want them to,” Gay insists. She shelved the project until the success of An Untamed State, and Bad Feminist allowed her to revive it. “I told one, ‘That’s exactly what I’m going for.’” “A lot of editors thought it was too dark and depressing,” she remembers. Difficult Woman proved difficult to sell.
These stories actually predate all that: She wrote them mostly during her days as a graduate student at Michigan Technological University on the Upper Peninsula.
